Eat That Metaphor

Writers often describe eating and cooking in such vivid detail that the author’s drool marks need to be edited out along with errant commas. As Adam Gopnik noted in last year’s Food Issue, some literary dishes can be reproduced, with varying degrees of success: “Eating Gunter Grass’s flounder was actually like reading one of his novels: nutritious, but a little pale and starchy.”

Are there poems that likewise offer culinary instruction? A famous recipe by Williams Carlos Williams is simple: cold plums, nicked from the ice box, and very faint, barely registered regret. In “Making Breakfast,” Mary Stewart Hammond tells you to “get out the fat-back, knead the dough, / adjust the flame for a slow boil, / flick water on the cast-iron skillet / to check if it’s ready,” then contemplate whether this heavy breakfast—“this ritual, like a charm, / Southern women do after their men / make love to them in the morning”—served to an aging man with a belly “isn’t an act / of aggressive hostility and / or a symptom / of regressed tractability.” Li-Young Lee’s steamed trout, “seasoned with slivers of ginger, / two sprigs of green onion, and sesame oil,” seems simple, but the primary ingredient in “Eating Together” is companionship, which is difficult to find, even (or especially) in a city that has everything.

I consulted the poet and (infrequent but brilliant) blogger Arda Collins to see if she could come up with more poems in the culinary vein. She thought of Elizabeth Bishop’s “A Miracle for Breakfast,” in which “Each man received one rather hard crumb, / which some flicked scornfully into the river, / and, in a cup, one drop of the coffee.” It’s not much of a feast, written, as it was, during the Great Depression.

Collins’s second offering was James Wright’s “To a Blossoming Pear Tree.” She explained, “I, and I assume others, fantasize about eating a pear from the pear tree in James Wright’s poem. I think of it as a tree that yields only one pear, because there was a very little pear tree in my back yard growing up that only gave up one pear every year.” Wright’s tree is untouchable, practically mythical:

A pear from its branches would be a true miracle for breakfast. But Wright gives no guide for plucking a fruit, much less how to make pear flambé.

Collins added, “For whatever reason, the first thing that popped into my head without thinking about it was “Jesus’ Son,” which is not a poem and not about food, but apparently for some part of my mind it serves as both.”

Crime, drugs: some kind of joy, but not the joy of cooking.

Sign up for the daily newsletter.Sign up for the daily newsletter: the best of The New Yorker every day.